IceBoost: a Gradient-boosted Tree framework to model the ice thickness
of the World’s glaciers
Abstract
Knowledge of glacier ice volumes is crucial for constraining future sea
level potential, evaluating freshwater resources, and assessing impacts
on societies, from regional to global. Motivated by the disparity in
existing ice volume estimates, we present IceBoost, a global Machine
Learning framework to model individual glacier ice thickness
distributions.
IceBoost is a gradient-boosted tree trained with 3.7 million global ice
thickness measurements and an array of 34 numerical features. The
model’s error aligns within 10% of existing models outside polar
regions and is up to 30-40% lower at high latitudes. We find that
providing supervision by exposing the model to available glacier
thickness measurements reduces the error by up to a factor 2 to 3. A
feature ranking analysis reveals that geodetic information are the most
informative variables, while ice velocity can improve the model
performance by 6% at high latitudes. A major feature of IceBoost is its
ability to generalize beyond the training domain, producing meaningful
ice thickness distributions across all global regions, including ice
sheet peripheries.